REVIEW : Queens plan marriages and divorces
Posted on Sunday, March 19, 2006
The Sweet Potato Queens ’ Wedding Planner and Divorce Guide, by Jill Conner Browne, Crown, 304 pages, $ 22. 95.
Jill Conner Browne’s latest Sweet
Potato Queen installment is
divided into two sections: It’s one of those books you have to turn over and upside down after you get to the middle. The bifurcation is interesting, given Browne’s focus on the close relationship between the two institutions. “The divorce rate in this country is way high and climbing,” Browne writes. “I think a large part of this problem is that there are far too many weddings.” The frequent reminder of how difficult marriage can be, and how unrelated a wedding ceremony is to a marriage, may well be untenable to those who are actually planning a wedding, especially any head-in-the-clouds fiance types. Browne continually asks the would-be bride: Have you been particular enough ? Is this really what you want to do ? Like most good advice, Browne’s is likely to be lost on those who need it, but that won’t keep the rest of us from relishing her downhome, straight-talking, and of course queenly edicts.
The planner begins with Browne’s tongue-in-cheek assumption that you’ve read all her other books (there are four, including the pertinent Book of Love and Field Guide to Men ), “and yet despite everything I’ve told you, you may still find yourself teetering on the precipice of marriage. Don’t feel bad. Almost everybody has to learn everything the hard way.”
Let the chuckles begin. Browne’s humor, joined with her compassion, fearlessness and wisdom, is a potent mix.
THE NO-WEDDING PLANNER “The first two items to settle on for the wedding are the date and the location, which are often connected. Then we’ll work backward from there with a veritable mountain of mindless details that will confound you with their utter insignificance once the wedding year has come and gone and you are no longer the bride. You are merely a wife and you are married to that husband.”
Browne’s potency allows her to get by with things (like writing a wedding planner that discourages weddings ) a lesser author couldn’t. Her books are unabashedly prejudice toward women. She mentions homicide breezily and frequently (the divorce section begins with an illustration of a shotgun ). She touts her Web site, promotes her friends’ and family’s various interests. She gets angry, and she is prone to prodigious and creative swearing. She is inappropriate, jaded, did I mention funny as hell, and she is addictive.
“What is it we’re willing to get in front of a whole bunch of witnesses and swear we’ll do for the rest of our lives ?” Browne writes in a section called, “Vows, Prenups, and Kiss-offs.” “ I can tell you, this is one of your very short list.... Regarding anything vowlike from you, the bride, he should consider himself a blessed man that you’re willing to marry up with him at all and to stand up in front of God and everybody and promise to try real hard not to murder him in his sleep in the years to come. ”
OH HUNNY, JUST READ IT I discovered Browne a couple of years ago after picking up the Sweet Potato Queen’s Book of Love at a used bookstore. I flew threw it, then began to tell people about the Sweet Potato Queens. One woman said to me, “Oh, I don’t read those silly books.” Another said, “I’ve avoided those.” This effect on serious readers isn’t surprising; Browne’s book covers are absurd, covered with campy photos of the Sweet Potato Queens themselves: friends of Browne’s whose lives provide fodder for her anecdotes, a group of middleaged women in huge red wigs and ridiculous clothing, posed in various burlesque attitudes. Browne’s books also receive a generous splashing of that hot pink color that has come to represent — along with line drawings of martini glasses and stilettos — the presence of chick lit.
But Browne is much more than silly, despite the fact that her book covers are not the only thing about her that’s on the low-brow side. “Yallbonics,” as Browne calls her Southernisms, pepper every page, and her correctly applied “hauled off and” or “allowed as how” will ring true for anyone from the South.
Browne’s voice is, on the surface, self-centered and shallow, while the underlying sensibility is universal and perceptive, and this incongruity will tickle readers in possession of the irony gene. She often writes like she can’t write, throwing in cliches and deliberately awkward sentences, and it works marvelously, because Browne is a talented enough writer to absolutely own the good ol’ girl pose she assumes. She’ll fill several pages with irreverence, only to present a well-timed paragraph of compassion that makes the reader feel that she’s being hugged with words. She can address her reader with “oh hunny …” and somehow elicit all the angst of the female condition, while at the same time making you believe everything is going to be OK.
A QUIBBLE HERE AND THERE To dispense with the quibbles, some of the writing here feels a tad contrived; good material, yes, but darlings that should’ve been killed. Every once in a while an undisciplined tangent causes the book to drag. There are too many recipes, some even reproduced from her previous books, which give the reader the feeling that Browne is resorting to a bit of filler.
OK, that’s over with; let’s get back to what really matters. Perhaps what is most remarkable and lovely about Browne’s latest is that she has recently married a man whom she calls, saccharinely enough, “the cutest boy in the world.” But her viewpoint never comes close to being that of a “smug married,” to borrow a phrase from Bridget Jones’s Diary. The divorce side of the book is the funnier, richer, and often more approving portion, and while Browne has apparently followed her own mantra to “be particular” in choosing her third husband, she still keeps that questioning eyebrow raised, and her girlfriends close by. Even though she herself has fallen over the precipice, she’s sharp as ever, able to represent being hard enough to see the reality in front of you, while remaining soft enough to be capable of hope.
Browne writes the best kind of pink book, going well beyond shoes and martini glasses to teach something about how to be a strong woman, whether single, married, divorced, or otherwise. These are not books to be judged by their covers. Melissa King, author of She’s Got Next, lives in Fayetteville.
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